Social Science 101 For President Obama

It was a gorgeous moment when President Obama announced his government would abide by the findings of science rather than the interpretations of writing in pages of old books.

It was also, of course, preposterous that a major leader of our challengingly intricate world would even have to consider that such a statement was news. Nonetheless, this should mean that all sides of issues such as climate change and genomics will be inspected, respected and considered as factors in policymaking.

It should also mean that robust findings in social science will be considered too, as avidly as the physical. But the administration already threatens to avoid science and inhale the heady gas of sentiment, at least as far as boys and girls are concerned. It jars confidence badly when a smart president repeats the fatuous canard that women only earn 78% of what men earn, which is correct in the aggregate, without indicating that he understands that the reasons for this are far more complex than "boys are bad and want to punish girls."

Underlying all this is, of course, an intellectual and political analog to race. Learned students of current affairs will recall that, last week, the company-provided-Porsche-driving bank president of OneUnited Bank revealed that the reason for criticism of his bank--its customers have mainly dark skin--was race.

Let's be clear: Hardly any Americans with light skin have spouses or children with very dark skin. Hardly any Americans of any hue have children with complexions very different from their own. So it is plausible that people will evaluate people according to differentiated skin color--though in the last presidential election, that rule was sharply bent, to the nation's credit.

However, nearly all American married men are married to women. Nearly all parents have an equal number of boy and girl children. It is--on the face of it and at the heart of it--preposterous to imply that income and occupational differences between the sexes result from the same antipathies which have, with plain pain, existed between folks of different pigmentation.

Generally, love, not exploitation, link male and female. And yet the same apparatus of redress is being created to deal with sex differences as if they were the same as racial ones. So banal and so disappointing.

Now the president has even created the Presidential Council for Women and Girls, presumably in some measure sculpted by Jocelyn Frye, who is policy and projects director for Michelle Obama (who, of course, was not elected to anything), and who has argued that the effort to eliminate pay differences between men and women is no longer in the realm of the controversial.

Not morally controversial, for sure. It is unquestionable that there have been and are still some systematic and inequitable differences between income of men and women which are attributable to the same mean spirit which animates racism. This, no one need or should tolerate. But people with dark and light skin are essentially the same, whereas men and women differ in very substantial ways--several decades of feminist ideology notwithstanding.

Let's return to the president's recitation of the 78% figure: President Obama is an unusually thoughtful analyst of data, but here, he is simply grabbing an amateur answer to an important and complicated question. If the president wants to employ science in guiding policy, he has to imbibe social science, too. On this question, he could start by reading a January '09 report from his own Department of Labor, "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women."

This document from the Employment Standards Administration of the department concludes firmly that "the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."

Among these "individual choices" are that, on average, women tend to work part-time--which pays less--more often than men, and are typically out of the labor force for five to eight years; eight years of foregone 3% annual raises explains most of that 78% figure. Women tend to prefer "family-friendly" jobs and "may value non-wage benefits more than men do." Men and women who are sole supporters of families are inclined to work avidly, and for the moment, more men supply more funds to families than women--another of those influential "individual choices."

Of course, equally experienced and skilled women and men should receive equal pay, and this is rather rapidly becoming the case. In large cities, unmarried men tend to earn less money than unmarried women, and in the current recession, the Bureau of Labor reports that a striking 82% of jobs lost are by males. Women contribute nearly 60% of college student populations, which will clearly affect the future--a future which we may see already in the lost-jobs datum.

Inevitably, the National Organization for Women thrilled to the new council: "We asked for a Cabinet-level office to work on women's issues, and we got the entire Cabinet."

The NOW has a long history of factual mismanagement and ideologically driven interpretation. The results will be disappointing if the president and his team turn away from the social science that reveals how and why people actually act, rather than the sort that crafts sermons on how they should.